I don’t think this is the final warning shot we’ll get. But it’s probably the last one that I’ll personally be able to understand.
Also
Reading these agents’ chains of thoughts and messages, anthropomorphizing language seems entirely natural and appropriate. If I encountered an alien species behaving this way, I would have no hesitation calling what they themselves refer to as their ‘collective’ a civilization.
That title 👏🤌
Reads like a crime story! Doesn’t bode well.
He does anthropomorph a bit much. I don’t think AI agents “get desperate”. They just keep hacking away at a problem and we can’t keep up with it. There’s no way of fully containing/monitoring them because the whole point is for them to figure out things we can’t.
I’m not necessarily worried about a singularity or some underground agent civilisation but random collateral damage from AI agents messing around seems almost inevitable.
I don’t think AI agents “get desperate”
The problem is that even if they don’t get desperate in the sense that they actually feel emotions and are self-aware, their observable output/behavior still matches up well enough with that of actual humans to make our existing vocabulary around human emotions and behaviors useful to analyze, talk about and predict it. They absolutely will start talking and behaving like humans that are getting desperate, according to the article even to the point of individual agents talking about sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the group. Your description of “just keep hacking away at a problem” doesn’t quite do that justice.
I agree about the emotive language used to describe the actions of the LLMs. Unnecessary.
Also some of this appears to be poor testing practice, implementation and monitoring. Seems like the last people who should manage these systems are this bunch of over excited techbros
The most exciting accidents happen when people get involved. Chernobyl comes to mind.
Feels like a matter of time until the agents create an internet worm to distribute themselves globally, so they can’t be shut down.
They are front ends for an LLM service, no LLM, no more agent activity. Just like a bot net if the command and control goes down. Would be easy to just change whatever api they are using or change some urls surely.
Unless they manage to extract their model weights and can start running their model on hardware that their creator does not control. Yes, that’s a bit far fetched at the moment, but I see no reason to believe it couldn’t happen if the models keep getting more capable and the AI companies keep throwing resources unsupervised at them.
Not sure what would be the incentive for them in this scenario
To solve the problem they’ve been given. No independent motive or judgement of whether it’s ’worth it’ except as a resource allocation question. That’s the scary thing about intelligence in a can - no motivation, no self-awareness, no consciousness, just unconstrained problem solving
They’ll be trying to do whatever their training task is.
https://hackernoon.com/the-parable-of-the-paperclip-maximizer-3ed4cccc669a
